Ukraine says it destroyed Russian ammo depot
The Ukrainian military on Tuesday reported destroying a Russian ammunition depot in southern Ukraine, resulting in a massive explosion captured on social media, while rescuers said the death toll from a weekend Russian strike in the country’s east grew to 45.
An overnight rocket strike targeted the depot in Russianheld Nova Kakhovka, the Ukrainian military’s southern command said. Nova Kakhovka is about 35 miles east of the Black Sea port city of Kherson, which is also occupied by Russian forces.
The precision of the strike suggested Ukrainian forces used U.S.-supplied multiplelaunch High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS. Ukraine indicated in recent days that it might launch a counteroffensive to reclaim territory in the south as Russia bombards the eastern Donbas region.
Russia’s Tass news agency offered a different account of the blast in Nova Kakhovka, saying that a mineral fertilizer storage facility exploded and that a market, hospital and houses were damaged. Some of the ingredients in fertilizer can be used for ammunition.
A satellite photo taken Tuesday and analyzed by the Associsian Press showed significant damage. A huge crater gaped precisely where a large warehouse-like structure once stood.
Ukraine now has eight of the HIMAR systems, a truckmounted missile launcher with high accuracy, and Washington has promised to send four more.
Explosions were reported late Tuesday in Luhansk, a city in the Donbas that has been under the control of Russianbacked separatists since 2014, with videos posted on social media. A spokesman for the separatist forces, Andrei Marochko, said the Ukrainian army had dealt a “massive blow” to the air defense system in Luhansk, the Russian news agency Interfax reported. He said there was no word yet on any casualties. There was no immediate information from the Ukrainian government or military.
“The occupiers have already felt what modern artillery is like, and their rear will not be safe anywhere on our land that they have occupied,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address. “They have felt that the operations of our intelligence officers for defending their homeland are of a magnitude stronger than any of their special operations.”
Elsewhere in Ukraine, Rusated shelling over the past 24 hours killed at least 16 civilians and wounded 48 more, Ukraine’s presidential office said in its Tuesday morning update. Cities and towns in five southeast regions came under Russian fire, the office said.
Nine civilians were killed and two more wounded in Donetsk province, which makes up half of the Donbas. Russian rocket attacks targeted the cities of Sloviansk and Toretsk, where a kindergarten was hit, the presidential office said.
The British military said Tuesday that Russia was continuing to make “small, incremental gains” in Donetsk, where heavy fighting led the province’s governor last week to urge its 350,000 remaining residents to move to safer places in western Ukraine.
Yet many in the Donbas, a fertile industrial region in eastern Ukraine consisting of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, refuse — or are unable — to flee, despite scores of civilians being killed and wounded each week.
The death toll from a Russian rocket attack that struck a Donetsk apartment building Saturday rose to 45, the emergency services agency said late Tuesday. It said workers found more bodies and also rescued nine people as they dug through the rubble of the five-story building in Chasiv Yar throughout the day.